Digital Kids Digital Readers

DIGITAL KIDS DIGITAL READERS

As part of the TLDL EDES543 course Contemporary Literacies we were required to create a professional development online workshop for teachers and/or teacher librarians. The link above is to a very thorough online presentation for those interested in introducing and managing eBooks in schools. Many thanks to my classmates April, Cherie, Katie, Laurie and Lissa.

Tech in Perspective

http://www.flickr.com/photos/43217080@N00/1169807846

An informal meeting with a board Technology Resource Teacher (ITRT) today made me review the progress we have made implementing technology at my school. A little refresher to put things in perspective.
Library Tech:

• wireless hub 
• 13 netbooks + 4 desk top PCs
• 4 flip cameras
• 15 headset/microphones
• Evernote & Diigo added to netbook image

• Wiki use for social studies and science projects (gr. 6)
• wiki use for reading strategies demonstration (gr. 7)
• use of Flickr and FlickrCC resources
• Glogster presentations (prior to board blocking)
• Prezi creation with French classes (gr. 8)
• Diigo recommended for student collection of bookmarks (g.r 8)
• Bibme accounts for collection of citations (gr. 8)
• introduction of alternate search engines; Sweet Search, Mashpedia, Boolify and Yippy
• 16 Sqworl pathfinders for a variety of subject areas (gr. 6,7,8)
• podcasting with six science classes (gr.8)
• video creation with two media classes (gr.7)
• introduction to blogging for eight classes (gr.7, 8)
• purchase of Weebly Campus Account
• ten teachers set up Weebly class accounts
• purchase of PodOmatic podcasting account for school
• planned PD to introduce Diigo and Twitter as tools for PLN

Tech in the school:

• wireless hubs on three mobile netbook labs (20 netbooks/ one cart/grade level)
• use of Google docs at staff meeting and student focus groups
• VP's from our superintendency visit digitally savvy schools in B.C.
• teacher attendance at board-wide Tech conference
• School blogs with student content, photos, Voice thread

Our digital footprint is much better than we thought and growing.

Blogging/Blogger: Pros and Cons

Pros:
-free and unlimited blogs
-professional, personal, instructional uses
-unlimited content possible
-opportunity to share beyond the classroom
-opportunity for participation by all students in curriculum conversations
-personalizing with selection of themes, layout, images
-addition of video, audio, digital images, screen capture
-links to web sites, blogs, YouTube, web pages
-embed hyperlinks, video, avatars, widgets
-RSS feeds allow following of favourites
-capture favourite blogs in Google Reader or another aggregator
-tagging or labeling to ease searches
-allows collaboration
-socializes information with comments
-part of your digital footprint
-opportunity to write for a larger audience
-helps develop Professional Learning Community
-encourages critical thinking
-statistics are available

Steps to Web 2.0 audience November 20

Cons:
-institutional internet filter blocking of blogs
-Google accounts inability to "talk" to other accounts
-moderating of comment content may be necessary
-possible miscommunication or misunderstanding of posts

Delving Deeper into Diigo: Step Three

Updating my Diigo profile included adding a photo, my Diigo network groups and followers, a short bio and links to this blog, my YouTube channel and Twitter account as well as my top and recent tags. Access to this information through Diigo will hopefully encourage other Diigo users to follow me and increase the potential of my PLN.

I was able to search Diigo Groups using key word search terms and located groups reflecting my interests.  As a group member I am able to see statistics for these groups which indicate some have lost momentum and other groups have members who are regularly tagging and sharing. I will need to weed my list to remove groups with no activity.

I have become a member of the following groups:

Classroom 2.0
Comics for Learning
Cool Tools for Educators!
Discovery Educator Network
EdTechTalk
educators
elearning 2.0
Graphic Novels
LearningwithComputers
Let's Manga
Middle School English
Purposeful Learning Technologies
Social Bookmarking
teacher-librarians
Teaching and Learning with Web 2.0
Technology Integration in Education
Web 2.0 tools for teachers
Web2.0 at school

I have created a Diigo group which will provide sources of material for a column I will be writing for The Teaching Librarian. I am hoping to draw other teacher librarians as members and benefit from crowd-sourced material shared in my group. Berger (2010) suggests social bookmarking should be used in education because it "allows users to tap the 'collective intelligence' of the web,"(p.51) valuing more the sites tagged by more group members.

In order to access my Diigo in Education group on my home computer I added the RSS feed for this Diigo Group to my Google Reader. To encourage readers of my blog to tag, save and share my posts I added a Diigo widget to my blog.

One Diigo web service tool allows a user to automatically post Diigo links to a blog daily or weekly. Or users can post an enhanced linkroll which will feed recent bookmarks and annotations to a blog. It is HTML code and can be embedded to the blog layout or to a post.

My Diigo